A "Rare Public Appearance"

It was pretty perverse to pick up The New York Times last week and read that the Vice President of the United States of America, a still free and open democracy (despite John Ashcroft's best efforts), had surfaced in "a rare public appearance," in which he defended his administration's economic policies and spoke out against corporate misconduct.

A rare public appearance. This is a term that, I recall, was used often when the media would discuss the late film star Greta Garbo and the weird recluse Howard Hughes. But a vice president? With regard to world leaders?and let's face it, Dick Cheney, who everyone agrees is one of the most powerful vice presidents we've had, is a world leader?"rare public appearance" has been applied in the past to, oh, say, the devious, mysterious autocrats who run the People's Republic of China. More recently it's been applied to none other than Saddam Hussein. The point is not that Cheney is a communist or a lunatic, but this: Leaders who are afraid of what lies out there in people's minds live underground.

Perhaps most pertinently, the "rare public appearance" phrase is also currently being applied to WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers and Enron's Kenneth Lay, both of whom have been in hiding amid the corporate business scandals that are plaguing the White House as well. When it's come to this, where the mere sight of our Vice President appearing in public is, as The Washington Post noted, "unusual," when he is taking the fifth in response to reporters' questions about his dealings at Halliburton (even though there is much he certainly can answer to at this point), and when he is hounded by protesters charging that he's a "corporate crook," things are pretty dicey indeed.

Clearly the White House thinks it can trot Cheney out in August, when people aren't paying attention, have him offer his "no comment" and get all of this behind him before the election season is in full swing, when he'll be needed to raise more funds and to possibly give a push to Republican congressional candidates. (The Bushies may even be pressuring their man at the SEC, Harvey Pitt, to get Cheney cleared of his Halliburton mess by then as well.) It may well work, not because the administration is in any way on firm ground?both George W. Bush and Cheney have zero credibility in discussing the corporate scandals, most notably because they've not adequately explained their own slippery business?but because news organizations may give the Bush administration a big wet kiss right through to the November elections.

With the freaky season upon us?that time of year when people are less focused on the news, and when television news producers go to desperate lengths to get people sucked in?such stories as the splitting of Guatemalan Siamese twins and the kidnappings of young girls (even though there's been no upsurge in such abductions, as compared to other years) are flooding the airwaves. And with Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer busy goring each other over who would get the exclusive interview with the rescued Pennsylvania miners, and with a Today show booker exposed for buying a pair of pants for one of the recently abducted and raped California teenagers shortly after she'd agreed to give the show an exclusive, I wouldn't put much faith in the press corp?at least the tv crowd?at this point.

And we're about to enter into the Sept. 11 anniversary 24/7 media bonanza, which will no doubt spin the entire country into a weeks-long, hypersentimental, super-patriotic diversionary dervish. It will basically amount to a television network-produced propaganda campaign that promotes the one thing that the Bush administration can claim, according to the opinion polls, as a victory: its response to the terrorist attacks.

That "victory," however, is a fallacy. For here we are, almost a year after the terrorists attacked us, and the administration has not caught up with Mullah Omar, nor does it know Osama bin Laden's whereabouts, "dead or alive," as our President once promised. We couldn't catch these two-bit thugs, guys who've been living in caves and traveling with caravans, in a ravaged country where the resistance collapsed quickly and with almost every nation on the planet supporting us. Meanwhile, we're supposed to have confidence in this administration's ability to lead us into war and get the crafty Saddam Hussein, who has surrounded Baghdad with elite troops, and supposedly possesses the dreaded "weapons of mass destruction"?this time, without even the support of countries in the region, let alone the world?

But let's get back to that pass the Bushies seem to get from the press and what the reasons for it might be. It's been said that the media realized, far too late, just how ugly they got with Bill Clinton, sensationalizing, packaging and selling a nothing scandal, ultimately greatly damaging our political system and affecting us all in detrimental ways. Now, this argument goes, they're afraid of ever doing it again, so they're being hyper-cautious with Bush?to the point of letting him off scot-free. Maybe that is true: The Washington Post, which railed endlessly against Clinton over Whitewater?the investigations of which cost millions of our taxpayer dollars and netted nada?wrote an editorial recently imploring us all to lay off of Bush regarding his Harken Energy scams (for the good of the country, you understand). And the Democrats, as it's often been said, just don't go for the jugular in the way the Republicans do, wimping out right when they should be thrusting forward, thus not helping the media to get a story with more bite.

Whatever the reasons, you can rest assured that if this were the Clinton administration in office rather than the W administration, the blaring attack headlines would be nonstop and tv news would be on the administration's butt like there was no tomorrow. If Clinton and Gore were in the White House right now and were involved in the same corporate scandals, two independent investigations?one for Harken, one for Halliburton?would be under way. There would be congressional hearings about why we've failed to meet the primary mission in Afghanistan, why we didn't get the leader of Al Qaeda and the leader of the Taliban, which would shift the entire debate on the effectiveness of the "war on terror." And there would be another investigation into why the administration was asleep at the switch from the get-go, as Time magazine's cover story last week showed, stalling the previous administration's antiterrorism activities.

All this talk of an invasion of Iraq, meanwhile, would be laughed off as yet another ploy to change the subject from the president's own personal problems. And if the vice president went underground just as he was being investigated for corporate misconduct he'd be flushed out pronto by reporters. When our leaders are making "rare public appearances," you better believe it's time for relentless questions.